Last week's "What Do You Think?" poll here on Inside Line asked which of five automotive dream jobs would be the most attractive to you. Sure, such Web polls are unscientific, but winning an easy plurality (44 percent of the vote) was "stunt driver for The Dukes of Hazzard movie." Maybe these results reflect a desire to hobnob with Jessica Simpson and Johnny Knoxville. But we believe they indicate that lots of folks want to fly the General Lee.
While maybe two dozen different stunt drivers worked on the Dukes movie that opens August 5th, it was 32-year-old Rhys Millen who primarily drove the General Lee Dodge Charger and it was usually Kevin Scott, 44, who was chasing him in a series of camera vehicles.
Under the guidance of second unit director Dan Bradley, whose recent work includes the incredible car chases in The Bourne Supremacy, it was their job to get the General Lee leaping and drifting, and to make you believe an orange 36-year-old Dodge the size of a strip mall could pirouette, glide and slide like a 2-ton Fred Astaire.
Whatever its other cinematic virtues and vices, The Dukes of Hazzard movie does have some of the best stunt driving yet and some astonishing automotive action photography. Millen, Scott and Bradley shared with Inside Line how it was done.
Putting Together the Team
Just as director Jay Chandrasekhar put together the movie's cast, Dan Bradley put together the team that would execute the action sequences.
"When they hired me, the first thing I told them was that I didn't want the action to look like the TV show," said Bradley. So coming off his experience filming The Bourne Supremacy in Russia and Germany, he decided to go with the core group he used during that production, including stunt coordinators Darrin Prescott and Scott Rogers (Bradley's partners in Go Stunts, Inc.) and Kevin Scott while seeking out drivers in America who had many of the same talents as the drivers used during Bourne.
"On Bourne Supremacy we used Martin Ivanov, who was a Russian rally champion in Moscow, to do the driving," recalls Scott. "And his level of driving had so much more energy because of the action with the vehicle. And when we came back we continued to talk about it. And when Dan got Dukes, he said we gotta get rally drivers." In America, rally drivers often come with the name Millen attached - either Rhys or his renowned father Rod.
But Millen's current motor sport isn't rallying, it's drifting where he runs a factory-sponsored Pontiac GTO. "The first dialogue that we had extended from them wanting information on renting rally cars," says Rhys Millen who has a solid side career driving in TV commercials and speaks with the unmistakable accent of his native New Zealand (he's now a resident of Huntington Beach, California). So we showed him a couple of the rally cars and at that time took the opportunity to show him and Dan Bradley some of the drift footage. From that Kevin invited me up to an audition at the back lot of Warner Brothers to test-drive one of the Chargers that were going to be used for the show along with a bunch of other stunt guys. And I got a call back to say I got the job." They would have hired Rhys' father, too, but he couldn't fit the production into his schedule.
When the movie crew arrived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, last November to begin filming, it was decided that Millen would double for Seann William Scott as primary stunt driver of the General Lee. More accurately, the many General Lees.
The 26 Generals
The Dukes of Hazzard have always had a voracious appetite for Dodge Chargers. During production of the TV series' 147 episodes between 1978 and 1985 somewhere near 300 Chargers were destroyed portraying the General Lee. For the film a total of 26 Chargers were acquired (14 1969 models plus eight 1968 and four 1970 editions modified to look like '69s) and each was built to fill particular needs during filming. Not all of them survived.
John Wiser, the production's picture car buyer, found Chargers all over the country in conditions ranging from rot-and-body-filler-atop-Bondo-and-rust to absolutely pristine. All were equipped with roll cages built by A.J. Thrasher who had built the cages for the original series' Chargers, all were painted Corvette orange, all got the familiar "01" numbers on the doors and the flag on the roof and all were fitted with the now rare American Racing Vector 15-inch wheels and BFGoodrich Radial T/A tires.
But they're not strictly identical to the cars run during the series. These cars were fitted with aftermarket steering wheels and stereos, the CB antenna on the deck lid is a different Radio Shack model and the license plates (CNH 320 on the General) actually identify the state they're in as Georgia.
Mechanically the Chargers were a hodge-podge with most of the cars retaining their original 383-cubic-inch V8s and three-speed automatic transmissions. But a few had 440s under their hoods, a few had small-block Chrysler engines (mostly 318s) and one car was equipped with a four-speed manual transmission. Some of the rusted hulks, in fact, had no engines at all since they were to be launched by pneumatic rams during three of the film's giant jumps - each over 100 feet in length.
Other modifications included limited-slip differentials on some of the cars, and some were equipped with Howe Steering Quickeners so the lock-to-lock was down to a mere one-and-half turns.
Although the concentration on all the cars was reliability rather than sheer performance, one car, a '68 tweaked to look like a '69, had an actual Hemi engine under its hood. It was used during production of the original Dukes of Hazzard series and has been in Warner Brothers' possession ever since. It was used in close-ups during the filming of the movie, and returned to the Warner Brothers garage intact.
More Than Mere Generals
Two Dodge Chargers were specially modified by the special effects department under coordinator Burt Dalton and foreman Elia Popov to put the actors into the action as much as possible. The first was a photo buck built by whacking off everything forward of the Charger's firewall and mounting what was left to the Go Mobile, a specialized camera platform built around the mechanical pieces of a 1974 Cadillac Eldorado.
With the front-drive Cadillac transaxle providing the motivation, and Kevin Scott doing the driving from inside a remote-mounted pod, a camera crew aboard the Go Mobile (owned and developed by Bradley's Go Stunts) could use the Panavision Mini-Techno crane to pan up from the Charger's spinning rear wheels to the actors furiously pretending to drive and emote inside the intact cockpit.
The second General Lee Charger was built as the Remote Drive Vehicle (RDV) with a driving pod similar to the Go Mobile's mounted on the roof. Once again with Kevin Scott doing the driving from way-up-there, the actors in the intact cockpit could pretend to be driving while cameras shot over their shoulders or straight into their faces as the car spun, slid and generally misbehaved.
"It handles far better than you'd think," says Kevin Scott, "because we built it from the ground up to handle the weight. I could independently adjust airbags at each corner depending on which direction I'd be sliding. The biggest issue in the RDV is that when you get in trouble it doesn't let you know. You develop a feel for the edge by anticipation."
For Millen the challenge lay in swapping between cars. "It only typically takes a little spin around the block to kind of define the idiosyncrasies of the cars on what's gonna work or what's not, line up and take on the shot," he explained. "So, it wasn't too big of a deal. The biggest deal was that one or two of the cars were set up specifically for what I liked. And if they broke down then I was jumping into a car that was completely different. And you'd just spent three or four days or the whole day in one car and then you are expected to pull off the same shot in a car that the shocks are wrong and the engine may not be as good or the differential may not be a limited slip or even the steering was instead of one and a half turns lock to lock had six. So there were definitely challenges throughout the day for everyone and those were some that I faced."
The Long Drift Goodnight
While the jumps in The Dukes of Hazzard movie are spectacular, the most impressive piece of driving in the film is likely the multiple laps of a New Orleans (doubling for Atlanta) traffic circle performed by Millen in the General Lee with the car in a full-on opposite-lock drift the entire time.
"I don't know if you would even call it a stunt," says Millen, "it's more of a performance driving shot. We went and looked at the city chase and a good part of it was a big circle. When it was first established, it was just gonna be kind of racing around there at close quarters. And when we got there to actually film, Dan was like, 'Well, do you think you could, you know, kind of slide or drift all the way around here?' And, I was, like, 'Yeah, let's give it a shot.' So we put the car on a mark, and everyone took a couple of steps back and I just went and fired off two or three laps and stopped the car right back on the same mark. Everyone kind of laughed and giggled a bit and Dan said, 'OK, we're gonna do this today.'"
For most of those orbits Kevin Scott was right behind Millen - sometimes just inches away - in the production's Mitsubishi Evolution VIII (a former Millen rally car) with a $200,000 camera hanging off its nose - chasing him. "I think the one thing that Rhys is graciously failing to mention is the fact that it was a four-lane circle," says Scott, "and there was moving traffic in the No. 1 lane and No. 4 lanes. And he was drifting in No. 2 and 3 lanes. So he didn't have a whole lot of room. And, you know, there were times where, you know, I think he had less than a foot on the front bumper and the rear bumper, at about 45 miles an hour, completely sideways.
"You know what's cool about that specific piece is that I have never seen that style of driving in a movie before," continues Scott, "particularly sustained as long as we did. And I'm talking about really close proximity. There was one time that Rhys said, 'Hey, I know you're really close, because I can hear the turbo bypass in the Evo going off.'"
Hard Jumps and Soft Jumps
The climactic General Lee jump of the film was shot in Clinton, Louisiana, in January with, initially, stunt driver Mark Hager piloting. Planned to go 140 feet with the Feliciana Parish courthouse in the background, the first attempt wound up only going about 70 feet. So it was later reshot with a driver-less car shot into the air pneumatically.
While the flights wound up performed by unguided Charger missiles, those invariably ended with devastating - survivable by neither human nor Dodge - crashes. Of course, Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott and Jessica Simpson weren't around for the on-screen landings; they were all accomplished by the stunt men. "Pretty much every big jump was followed up by what they call a soft ramp jump," says Millen.
"You had to drive out of the jump to continue the scene. Some of them were a one ramp, where we had run two wheels up onto it and give the car a big twist, and then land and come down. Others were actually full jumps. I had the opportunity to do two of those. One was across a creek, and then was kind of side-by-side, when Billy Pricket and the General Lee were racing each other. So that was pretty neat. And now I'm able to say that I jumped the General Lee. The landings though weren't so great, because the suspension is not modified. Typically, you were landing into soft gravel on the roads, or something like that would really absorb a lot of forward energy out of the cars. And some that were a little bigger than those, I actually chose not to do because of a back injury I got last year."
Those jumps however weren't the hairiest moments on the shoot. "There are particular shots in the movie where Rhys comes around and throws a power slide 90 and makes a left turn and then does a 180," says Scott with a touch of awe in his voice. "At that 180 the trunk of his car crossed underneath the camera. So we were probably - when he threw that 180 - probably within 6 to 8 inches. I don't know if he agrees or not, but that was one shot that certainly got my attention. I was on top of it."
Mutually Assured Collision
If there's one thing that an on-camera stunt driver needs, it's confidence in the guy driving the camera car. And vice versa.
"It's the relationship that you share - that you have the confidence in the ability of each other," explains Millen. "You know, when I'm in a lead position I'm just doing my act. We've already planned it out. So I'm aware that Kevin is there in case I do something wrong. But I'm basically blocking him out from even my field of vision. Essentially it's up to him to stick the camera in there tight and he'll adjust for me because he is following. Now when I'm in the follow position it's a very similar situation but reversed, obviously. He is aware of the corners in the roads that are coming up because he is blocking my vision and I just need to adjust the camera. Having the confidence that you can rush up to camera in a slide and round a corner and knowing he's not gonna do anything silly.
"So when you see the grille of the General Lee on the big screen and you're just reading Charger or you're just seeing a headlight you're, like, wow, that's close. On the flipside all that I'm seeing is just a camera lens or a matte box. It's definitely exciting but rewarding because you're working in such close proximity."
Old School, New School
The Dukes of Hazzard may have been Millen's first big movie, but he brought along some friends from the drifting world. "It was kind of at the request of Dan and Kevin," he says. "And maybe a couple of suggestions that I made to, you know, add a similar flair to what I was doing in the General Lee with driving styles that I knew these guys were familiar. Tanner Foust, who I compete against in the Formula D Drift Championship did some driving. And Rich Rutherford, who's also part of Drivers Inc., this commercial driving team that I'm with drove some of the earlier scenes, and in police cars. And Greg Tracy drove a bit of the Evo rally car when Kevin was unavailable and driving the Go Mobile for the first unit."
Still with so much driving there was plenty of work for traditional Hollywood stuntmen as well. "There were times when we had in upward of 15 stunt guys on set," Scott recalls. "What's pretty amazing about the stunt community, and particularly the stunt guys we had on the show is all they had to do was see these guys drive, and they were accepted. Because you immediately have respect for their driving skills."
Never Meanin' No Harm
By Hollywood standards, The Dukes of Hazzard movie is a modestly budgeted (about $50 million) product. But it has a huge built-in audience - virtually everyone under 40 in America grew up with the Dukes either when the episodes were new or in reruns and even Rhys Millen remembers watching the show in New Zealand.
This movie has the advantage of low expectations. No one thinks it will be great art, just at best a good time watching an orange Dodge fly through the air in a fantasy land where no one ever gets hurt no matter how hard the crash. Throw in a couple jokes and Jessica Simpson in micro-shorts and a bikini top and this movie can't help but be a hit.
While maybe two dozen different stunt drivers worked on the Dukes movie that opens August 5th, it was 32-year-old Rhys Millen who primarily drove the General Lee Dodge Charger and it was usually Kevin Scott, 44, who was chasing him in a series of camera vehicles.
Under the guidance of second unit director Dan Bradley, whose recent work includes the incredible car chases in The Bourne Supremacy, it was their job to get the General Lee leaping and drifting, and to make you believe an orange 36-year-old Dodge the size of a strip mall could pirouette, glide and slide like a 2-ton Fred Astaire.
Whatever its other cinematic virtues and vices, The Dukes of Hazzard movie does have some of the best stunt driving yet and some astonishing automotive action photography. Millen, Scott and Bradley shared with Inside Line how it was done.
Putting Together the Team
Just as director Jay Chandrasekhar put together the movie's cast, Dan Bradley put together the team that would execute the action sequences.
"When they hired me, the first thing I told them was that I didn't want the action to look like the TV show," said Bradley. So coming off his experience filming The Bourne Supremacy in Russia and Germany, he decided to go with the core group he used during that production, including stunt coordinators Darrin Prescott and Scott Rogers (Bradley's partners in Go Stunts, Inc.) and Kevin Scott while seeking out drivers in America who had many of the same talents as the drivers used during Bourne.
"On Bourne Supremacy we used Martin Ivanov, who was a Russian rally champion in Moscow, to do the driving," recalls Scott. "And his level of driving had so much more energy because of the action with the vehicle. And when we came back we continued to talk about it. And when Dan got Dukes, he said we gotta get rally drivers." In America, rally drivers often come with the name Millen attached - either Rhys or his renowned father Rod.
But Millen's current motor sport isn't rallying, it's drifting where he runs a factory-sponsored Pontiac GTO. "The first dialogue that we had extended from them wanting information on renting rally cars," says Rhys Millen who has a solid side career driving in TV commercials and speaks with the unmistakable accent of his native New Zealand (he's now a resident of Huntington Beach, California). So we showed him a couple of the rally cars and at that time took the opportunity to show him and Dan Bradley some of the drift footage. From that Kevin invited me up to an audition at the back lot of Warner Brothers to test-drive one of the Chargers that were going to be used for the show along with a bunch of other stunt guys. And I got a call back to say I got the job." They would have hired Rhys' father, too, but he couldn't fit the production into his schedule.
When the movie crew arrived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, last November to begin filming, it was decided that Millen would double for Seann William Scott as primary stunt driver of the General Lee. More accurately, the many General Lees.
The 26 Generals
The Dukes of Hazzard have always had a voracious appetite for Dodge Chargers. During production of the TV series' 147 episodes between 1978 and 1985 somewhere near 300 Chargers were destroyed portraying the General Lee. For the film a total of 26 Chargers were acquired (14 1969 models plus eight 1968 and four 1970 editions modified to look like '69s) and each was built to fill particular needs during filming. Not all of them survived.
John Wiser, the production's picture car buyer, found Chargers all over the country in conditions ranging from rot-and-body-filler-atop-Bondo-and-rust to absolutely pristine. All were equipped with roll cages built by A.J. Thrasher who had built the cages for the original series' Chargers, all were painted Corvette orange, all got the familiar "01" numbers on the doors and the flag on the roof and all were fitted with the now rare American Racing Vector 15-inch wheels and BFGoodrich Radial T/A tires.
But they're not strictly identical to the cars run during the series. These cars were fitted with aftermarket steering wheels and stereos, the CB antenna on the deck lid is a different Radio Shack model and the license plates (CNH 320 on the General) actually identify the state they're in as Georgia.
Mechanically the Chargers were a hodge-podge with most of the cars retaining their original 383-cubic-inch V8s and three-speed automatic transmissions. But a few had 440s under their hoods, a few had small-block Chrysler engines (mostly 318s) and one car was equipped with a four-speed manual transmission. Some of the rusted hulks, in fact, had no engines at all since they were to be launched by pneumatic rams during three of the film's giant jumps - each over 100 feet in length.
Other modifications included limited-slip differentials on some of the cars, and some were equipped with Howe Steering Quickeners so the lock-to-lock was down to a mere one-and-half turns.
Although the concentration on all the cars was reliability rather than sheer performance, one car, a '68 tweaked to look like a '69, had an actual Hemi engine under its hood. It was used during production of the original Dukes of Hazzard series and has been in Warner Brothers' possession ever since. It was used in close-ups during the filming of the movie, and returned to the Warner Brothers garage intact.
More Than Mere Generals
Two Dodge Chargers were specially modified by the special effects department under coordinator Burt Dalton and foreman Elia Popov to put the actors into the action as much as possible. The first was a photo buck built by whacking off everything forward of the Charger's firewall and mounting what was left to the Go Mobile, a specialized camera platform built around the mechanical pieces of a 1974 Cadillac Eldorado.
With the front-drive Cadillac transaxle providing the motivation, and Kevin Scott doing the driving from inside a remote-mounted pod, a camera crew aboard the Go Mobile (owned and developed by Bradley's Go Stunts) could use the Panavision Mini-Techno crane to pan up from the Charger's spinning rear wheels to the actors furiously pretending to drive and emote inside the intact cockpit.
The second General Lee Charger was built as the Remote Drive Vehicle (RDV) with a driving pod similar to the Go Mobile's mounted on the roof. Once again with Kevin Scott doing the driving from way-up-there, the actors in the intact cockpit could pretend to be driving while cameras shot over their shoulders or straight into their faces as the car spun, slid and generally misbehaved.
"It handles far better than you'd think," says Kevin Scott, "because we built it from the ground up to handle the weight. I could independently adjust airbags at each corner depending on which direction I'd be sliding. The biggest issue in the RDV is that when you get in trouble it doesn't let you know. You develop a feel for the edge by anticipation."
For Millen the challenge lay in swapping between cars. "It only typically takes a little spin around the block to kind of define the idiosyncrasies of the cars on what's gonna work or what's not, line up and take on the shot," he explained. "So, it wasn't too big of a deal. The biggest deal was that one or two of the cars were set up specifically for what I liked. And if they broke down then I was jumping into a car that was completely different. And you'd just spent three or four days or the whole day in one car and then you are expected to pull off the same shot in a car that the shocks are wrong and the engine may not be as good or the differential may not be a limited slip or even the steering was instead of one and a half turns lock to lock had six. So there were definitely challenges throughout the day for everyone and those were some that I faced."
The Long Drift Goodnight
While the jumps in The Dukes of Hazzard movie are spectacular, the most impressive piece of driving in the film is likely the multiple laps of a New Orleans (doubling for Atlanta) traffic circle performed by Millen in the General Lee with the car in a full-on opposite-lock drift the entire time.
"I don't know if you would even call it a stunt," says Millen, "it's more of a performance driving shot. We went and looked at the city chase and a good part of it was a big circle. When it was first established, it was just gonna be kind of racing around there at close quarters. And when we got there to actually film, Dan was like, 'Well, do you think you could, you know, kind of slide or drift all the way around here?' And, I was, like, 'Yeah, let's give it a shot.' So we put the car on a mark, and everyone took a couple of steps back and I just went and fired off two or three laps and stopped the car right back on the same mark. Everyone kind of laughed and giggled a bit and Dan said, 'OK, we're gonna do this today.'"
For most of those orbits Kevin Scott was right behind Millen - sometimes just inches away - in the production's Mitsubishi Evolution VIII (a former Millen rally car) with a $200,000 camera hanging off its nose - chasing him. "I think the one thing that Rhys is graciously failing to mention is the fact that it was a four-lane circle," says Scott, "and there was moving traffic in the No. 1 lane and No. 4 lanes. And he was drifting in No. 2 and 3 lanes. So he didn't have a whole lot of room. And, you know, there were times where, you know, I think he had less than a foot on the front bumper and the rear bumper, at about 45 miles an hour, completely sideways.
"You know what's cool about that specific piece is that I have never seen that style of driving in a movie before," continues Scott, "particularly sustained as long as we did. And I'm talking about really close proximity. There was one time that Rhys said, 'Hey, I know you're really close, because I can hear the turbo bypass in the Evo going off.'"
Hard Jumps and Soft Jumps
The climactic General Lee jump of the film was shot in Clinton, Louisiana, in January with, initially, stunt driver Mark Hager piloting. Planned to go 140 feet with the Feliciana Parish courthouse in the background, the first attempt wound up only going about 70 feet. So it was later reshot with a driver-less car shot into the air pneumatically.
While the flights wound up performed by unguided Charger missiles, those invariably ended with devastating - survivable by neither human nor Dodge - crashes. Of course, Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott and Jessica Simpson weren't around for the on-screen landings; they were all accomplished by the stunt men. "Pretty much every big jump was followed up by what they call a soft ramp jump," says Millen.
"You had to drive out of the jump to continue the scene. Some of them were a one ramp, where we had run two wheels up onto it and give the car a big twist, and then land and come down. Others were actually full jumps. I had the opportunity to do two of those. One was across a creek, and then was kind of side-by-side, when Billy Pricket and the General Lee were racing each other. So that was pretty neat. And now I'm able to say that I jumped the General Lee. The landings though weren't so great, because the suspension is not modified. Typically, you were landing into soft gravel on the roads, or something like that would really absorb a lot of forward energy out of the cars. And some that were a little bigger than those, I actually chose not to do because of a back injury I got last year."
Those jumps however weren't the hairiest moments on the shoot. "There are particular shots in the movie where Rhys comes around and throws a power slide 90 and makes a left turn and then does a 180," says Scott with a touch of awe in his voice. "At that 180 the trunk of his car crossed underneath the camera. So we were probably - when he threw that 180 - probably within 6 to 8 inches. I don't know if he agrees or not, but that was one shot that certainly got my attention. I was on top of it."
Mutually Assured Collision
If there's one thing that an on-camera stunt driver needs, it's confidence in the guy driving the camera car. And vice versa.
"It's the relationship that you share - that you have the confidence in the ability of each other," explains Millen. "You know, when I'm in a lead position I'm just doing my act. We've already planned it out. So I'm aware that Kevin is there in case I do something wrong. But I'm basically blocking him out from even my field of vision. Essentially it's up to him to stick the camera in there tight and he'll adjust for me because he is following. Now when I'm in the follow position it's a very similar situation but reversed, obviously. He is aware of the corners in the roads that are coming up because he is blocking my vision and I just need to adjust the camera. Having the confidence that you can rush up to camera in a slide and round a corner and knowing he's not gonna do anything silly.
"So when you see the grille of the General Lee on the big screen and you're just reading Charger or you're just seeing a headlight you're, like, wow, that's close. On the flipside all that I'm seeing is just a camera lens or a matte box. It's definitely exciting but rewarding because you're working in such close proximity."
Old School, New School
The Dukes of Hazzard may have been Millen's first big movie, but he brought along some friends from the drifting world. "It was kind of at the request of Dan and Kevin," he says. "And maybe a couple of suggestions that I made to, you know, add a similar flair to what I was doing in the General Lee with driving styles that I knew these guys were familiar. Tanner Foust, who I compete against in the Formula D Drift Championship did some driving. And Rich Rutherford, who's also part of Drivers Inc., this commercial driving team that I'm with drove some of the earlier scenes, and in police cars. And Greg Tracy drove a bit of the Evo rally car when Kevin was unavailable and driving the Go Mobile for the first unit."
Still with so much driving there was plenty of work for traditional Hollywood stuntmen as well. "There were times when we had in upward of 15 stunt guys on set," Scott recalls. "What's pretty amazing about the stunt community, and particularly the stunt guys we had on the show is all they had to do was see these guys drive, and they were accepted. Because you immediately have respect for their driving skills."
Never Meanin' No Harm
By Hollywood standards, The Dukes of Hazzard movie is a modestly budgeted (about $50 million) product. But it has a huge built-in audience - virtually everyone under 40 in America grew up with the Dukes either when the episodes were new or in reruns and even Rhys Millen remembers watching the show in New Zealand.
This movie has the advantage of low expectations. No one thinks it will be great art, just at best a good time watching an orange Dodge fly through the air in a fantasy land where no one ever gets hurt no matter how hard the crash. Throw in a couple jokes and Jessica Simpson in micro-shorts and a bikini top and this movie can't help but be a hit.
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